Thinking about the final year

“We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life, as both Aristotle and Engels noted, we are always under certain constraints. We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others. (MacIntyre, 2007, p.213).

In practical terms, my fourth and last year seems to me as very clear in purposes and practicalities which I describe as follows:

  1. I need to upgrade;
  2. During the Summer break I am going to work on the gaps left in chapters 2 and 3;
  3. A small piloting involving typically developing children is to be recommend, and I am committed to make all efforts to access such children to put this into action;
  4. As early as the beginning of the school term in September I will contact schools requesting access for the definitive data collection;
  5. During the time that I will be contacting schools, I also will be working on my ‘dialogical inquiry’, especially deepening my knowledge on visual methods, in order to refine the whole process of data collection and simultaneous preliminary participative data analysis;
  6. In turn, I will complete the empirical study and the writing up of each chapter;
  7. I need to submit the thesis.

However, the above list is not extensive or definitive. Having decided to adopt a dialogical approach, induces me to adopt also the openness present in the dialogic attitude in my dialectical process of developing and carrying out this investigation. Any sort of prediction or anticipation I admit to have, is also an open-ended expectation prepared to be contradicted by the reality. I would like to finish this preamble leaving you with a statement which resonates on me powerfully:

Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing. It belies the notion of inner as well as of outer perfection; it falls short not only of the standard it should meet but also of the standard we though it could meet. We’re hollow on the inside as well as on the outside, pariahs in our expectations and in our realizations (Pessoa, 2001, p.150)

* This is an excerpt from the preamble of my upgrade document